Snow Leopard EFI Vanilla – part 2

27092009

Install Snow Leopard onto the HP Mini

1. With the USB installer plugged in, switch on the Mini and press F9 as it starts. You’ll see the boot menu screen. Use the up/down arrow keys to choose your USB Installer from the list and hit the Enter key. Wait until Darwin finish its countdown and boot “Mac OS X Install DVD” partition and get you into the Installer Program.

3. Choose Mac HD as the destination partition for installation. You can click on the Customize button at the lower left corner to specify which components you want to install. Note: Normally, I opt to exclude printer drivers, all other languages, X11 to save more hard disk real estate and include Rosetta (for MS Office:Mac, it isn’t Universal binary yet) and QuickTime Player 7, but it’s all up to you.

Note: The Installer program might tell you that the installation failed. Don’t worry about that – it’s just saying the system it has just installed can’t be restarted. But we have an external bootloader made just for that.

Ok.. I’ve managed to answer my own problem! When rebooting, during the countdown press anykey. Now use the left/right arrow keys to choose your USB drive and then press the down arrow. You will see a list of menu options. Choose “Ignore boot caches”. Now proceed as described in the instructions remembering to choose “Ignore boot caches” when you boot from the USB drive.
However, note that the trackpad will not work, there will be no sound and the keyboard won’t work. You need to plug in a USB mouse. This is fine because this is all you need. You can rename your hard drive from “Untitled” later.
Finally at the end of Step3 when you reboot using the internal hard drive, everything will work… sound, keyboard, mouse, wifi. Awesome!!

(One side note: The only thing so far that does not seem to work is the master volume control. Fn-F8, Fn-F10 and Fn-F11 all display the sound control but the volume does not change).

A huge kudos to the very clever people who made this happen. I can’t believe for <$400 (including $135 for iLife 09 and Snow Leopard and $40 for 2Gb RAM upgrade) that I have an amazing usable Hackintosh!

(1) and (2) worked for me, but I can’t see the “Install” button, because the screen resolution is too small (1024×600). Is there any shortcut or better is there a possibility to scroll over the canvas.

I tried to hook up my 24” TFT but my HP mini doesn’t have a video out.